Afore Capital retweeted
we're running it back w/ robots, researchers, engineers & founders interested in physical AI @AforeVC next Tue in SF (oh and sushi + pizza) - RSVP to get on the list if you want to catchup w friends @sundayrobotics @physical_int @AppliedInt @BedrockRobotics @SkildAI @Tesla @GoogleDeepMind and more!
partiful.com/e/aiB92GgPlsLbF…
Afore Capital retweeted
For 10 years, @AforeVC has invested in People Before Ideas.
Today our new website puts that front & center 🚀 afore.vc/residence
Here's what #PeopleBeforeIdeas means to us 👇
Afore Capital retweeted
@AforeVC giving us a little preview of life after Series B
Rental suite at Oracle tomorrow for Angels @ Giants
Neither team is good. Seats still slap.
I bet YC doesn’t do this
Upcoming FIR batch is coming up. Happy to refer you if you’re cracked
Afore Capital retweeted
Gemini 3.6 Flash (the 3.5 Flash upgrade) is SOTA on MMMU-Pro, the benchmark for multimodal reasoning and VQA.
We just built a benchmark it can’t pass.
Real visual questions from people across 100 countries. Counting, spatial reasoning, OCR, text in the wild. Every question here has already stumped a frontier model.
We did this in a week.
The current SOTA gets 41% of the way there on v1 of the benchmark.
The breakdown is rougher than the headline. Naming what it sees: 88%. Counting what it sees: 33%. Five tries per question, and 17 tasks failed all five.
Models become as good as their benchmarks. Today’s benchmarks are full of things models already do well, like coding. Real-world perception is not one of them.
Karpathy says AGI is a decade away. This data says he might be right.
AI labs: if you want your next model to actually see the real world, hmu.
Everyone else: what’s the simplest image that still breaks every model? 👇
Afore Capital retweeted
Most people today do their research and get recommendations from ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude for almost everything. Commercial signals that used to flow through search engines now flow through LLMs. SEO & SEM is now obsolete. @Petra_Labs has a shot at replacing them 🚀
We at @petra_labs raised $5.2M because one-size-fits-all software doesn’t work in zero-sum games like AI Search.
The greatest AI companies of the future will sell results, not software.
@rvmie_ @rishipenmetcha
Afore Capital retweeted
Today we’re giving you the first real choice in where to run your .xlsx files. We’re also announcing our pre-seed funding, led by Afore and joined by many prominent AI founders who share that conviction.
Excel is one of the greatest tools I’ve ever used. I grew up on it. I was forged by it. It is one of the great inventions of humankind.
But for forty years, the world’s most important file has had only one trusted way to run it: Microsoft Excel. Today, there are two.
Introducing Nobie. It will soon reach 100% feature parity with Excel. We’re building it for the 1 billion humans using Excel today and the 10 billion agents that will work with spreadsheets tomorrow.
Nobie is now in beta, available as a native Mac app and as a CLI on macOS and Linux. It’s free, and everything you can do in Excel will always be free in Nobie.
Nobie isn’t done. But the product you’re looking at today is a glimpse into the near future: what you and your friends are going to reach for when working with spreadsheets.
We are dedicated to a singular purpose: delete every reason you still need Excel. Before long, it will seem absurd that Excel was ever all we had.
Claude Code and Codex are built right into Nobie. Or bring your favorite agent, like Antigravity or Pi. Robots of all kinds are welcome.
So if you’re a human on a Mac or an agent on Linux, try it out and let us know what you think. We think you’ll soon make Nobie the default app for .xlsx.
Enjoy!
Afore Capital retweeted
never forget your first believer
when @AforeVC invested in me, @hyperspell didn’t exist
i was in the middle of a cofounder breakup in my last company and starting over from scratch
i hadn’t met my cofounder @maebert yet
there wasn’t even a company to invest in
they weren’t betting on traction
they were betting on a person
today we’re serving fortune 100 customers
through every stage, @AforeVC has been so much more than an investor and has never stopped believing in us
they’ve helped us win customers, hire great people, and become real friends and mentors along the way
i’ll never forget that first bet
Afore Capital retweeted
Today we’re introducing @Seda_AI_ - The world’s first end to end Synthetic UX Testing Agent 🤖
Afore Capital retweeted
Congratulations @rronak_ @MichaelElabd @QuantumArjun and team Trajectory on launch!!
I'm frequently asked “With vibe coding, do founders even need a technical advantage anymore?" Today with Trajectory s launch, you can see for yourself the answer!
the team has it all:
- technical
- commercial
- talent
triple threat
Could not imagine better people to work alongside, so proud to be a tiny investor and Congratulations on launch, team!!!!! @AforeVC
Let's f go! this is just the beginning 📈
Today, @MichaelElabd, @QuantumArjun, and I are excited to announce Trajectory.
We are a research lab and product company building the platform for Continual Learning.
Our platform unlocks the signal already sitting in product usage, so companies can continuously post-train large-scale agentic models that outperform the frontier. @trajectorylabs
We’ve raised $15M from @Conviction, @BessemerVP, @radicalvcfund, @jeffdean, @drfeifei and more.
We’re partnering with some of the best AI-native companies: @ClayRunHQ @Harvey, @DecagonAI, @mercor, @RogoAI to power their agentic systems, some of which we are already in production with.
We’ve brought together a world class research team from DeepMind, OpenAI, Apple, Meta Superintelligence, Amazon AGI, Scale AI, and an elite product team from Stripe and Figma.
AI will never again start on day one. Every correction, every retry, every edit will make products smarter. This is Continual Learning.
Afore Capital retweeted
we switched up the format last week and I loved hosting this intimate single-circle fireside chat w/ 20 founders and Zack Peng (@AforeVC founder of Seel) on "finding & founding" a $100M ARR business! 🎙️
want to join the next one? @AforeVC Founders in Residence summer cohort apps just opened - in 8 weeks, go from idea to first 5 customers! learn more: afore.vc/residence
and curious what Zack shared on his founder journey?
💡 Do you still need a unique insight: Zack had one - working as an engineer at an insurance company, he found it crazy that insurance was still being modeled off 30-year-old tabular data (e.g. how many times has this geo flooded in the last 30 years, vs. what is the weather like recently?). that belief - something better must be possible - is what got him started!
🔨 brute forcin' it...: flew to denver, spent hours in ubers pitching uber driver income risk (as a self-proclaimed introvert!! spoiler: no PMF)
🙋🏾♂️ Listening to first customer: "your risk analytics seems fine, but if you're really that good, I'll pay you $18 for every $20 you save me in returns...!" once you find that vocal, trusted customer, go build!
🏆 PMF is real. when you have it, you feel it. til then - change the product or change the ICP, don't get emotionally attached, and try to pivot fast! but ofc, easier said than done 🥲
if you want some help along the journey, join us for Founders-in-Residence summer cohort: afore.vc/residence
Afore Capital retweeted
how do SOME founders find a $100M+ ARR opportunity in a sea of AI-everything...?
we are gathering a curated group of future founders next Tues for a fireside chat @AforeVC !
if youre thinking of starting a company and wondering where great ideas start...
Meet @emily_yuan_ (cofounder @UseCorgi ) and Zack Peng (cofounder of Seel) & hear how they picked a big hairy industry, found a wedge, and survived to beat out incumbents
partiful.com/e/J8KhBfhxSJyCS…
Afore Capital retweeted
Are you in product design? If so, you are all too familiar with the painful process of creating your design in Figma and then shipping it off to the front end engineering team to "try" to recreate in code. It never looks the same. Not to mention all the wasted back and forth. In the world of fast-moving AI, you can't afford to use ancient tools. Meet @noondesign -- the first dual-canvas where you design how a product looks and how it works.
We at @AforeVC were lucky to back @bandiaditya, @kushagrasinha7 and the Noon team at pre-seed. Incredible what they've achieved in such a short time. Can't wait to see where they take this. LFG!!
noon.design/ or msg me for early access!
Afore Capital retweeted
sat down with @JasonGrohowski to talk about the earliest stages of company-building
@AforeVC often invests before a company exists, when ideas are still being formed; we call this "pre-seed 2.0" - shifting from investing in a company, to supporting a person or founding team
that means helping them find co-founders, develop ideas, and stress-test assumptions before there's anything to fund
youtube.com/watch?v=zK8XRSm7…
